Matt’s News / Blog

Today I went downtown Chicago for the MSDN Developers Conference. I had a good time and learned some things. I was a little disappointed with the keynote. It was mainly about Cloud Computing and Windows Azure. I guess my main concern would be trusting Microsoft with your App and Data. I suppose it would be good for some situations.

C# 4.0 has some interesting features. I’m not really that super excited about optional parameters and dynamic types. Dynamic typing in C# makes it feel like JavaScript… shudder…

Silverlight 3.0 looks very nice. There are some nice things like built in navigation, authentication and validation. All things very noticeably missing from 2.0.

Finally, I liked the F# presentation (except it was more about why instead of how). I think it definitely has it’s place and I’d like to learn more about it. If it’s anything like Haskell I’ll enjoy it.

I’m taking a class this semister called Language Structures. It’s a computer class that talks about different types of programming languages. So, we’ve had projects in a few more obsure programming languages. I just finished a project using the forth programing language of the class, haskel (others: java, small talk and prolog) being the others. The hard part of these projects is learning to think in the language and understand what the code means. Last night, I worked for a few hours on the project with little success. Most of my attempts at solutions were trial and error. I wasn’t ‘getting’ the language. Once you ‘get’ the language, solutions attempts move from trial and error to attempts that are much more crafted and verified. I had one of these break thoughts tonight. At the end of yesterday, I had very little accomplished on my project. Today, after a night’s sleep, I wrote the rest of the project in a short amout of time. This is one type of thing that makes computer science interesting and exciting. Learning new things and then applying the new knowledge to solve problems.

So, I started writing my Linux shell for Operating Systems. I decided to be terribly clever and name my shell, “Matt’s Shell” and use the file name “mshell”. The funny thing is it can be read either “m shell” or “ms hell”. Ironically, mshell only works on Linux.

This seems like an appropriate time to post this thought that has been floating around in my head this evening. I just finished my project for algorithms and one of the extra credit sections a week ahead of time. Why would I rather program then do any other homework? Simple, I love to program. Why do I love to program? Dorthy Sayers, in her book, The Mind of the Maker, deals with many subjects about God. One subject she discussed is what it means to be Made in the Image of God. “The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make thing.” So, the reason I love to program is because I am made in the Image of God and desire to make things (which happen to be programs for computers).

Yay! I finaly got the packet sniffer Melissa and I are writing for Data Comm working. The main source of my problems: C++. I’m realizing more and more that I don’t like programing in C/C++. I always seem to be fighting variable types and following stray pointers to the infinite abyss of NULL. If C++ was a kind of car, as Dr. Brandle illuistarted, it would be a bare frame, with wheels and an engine. There wouldn’t be any fancy things like doors or seats. I’d rather have a more complete car such as PHP. PHP is a big lush car, but dosn’t go very fast. I’m also finding that I like Java better. Even though it’s object crazy, it is more structured and seems to make more sense (and has better, centralized documentation). Well, enought rambling about programming languages…